Abstract

CONTRERAS TINOCO, Karla Alejandra; CASTANEDA-RENTERIA, Liliana Ibeth; PRADO-MEZA, Claudia M.  and  ROMERO-SALAZAR, Lorena. Women and science: Collective autoethnography about the extended costs of a scientific career in hybrid cultures. La ventana [online]. 2026, vol.7, n.63, pp.194-232.  Epub Mar 20, 2026. ISSN 1405-9436.  https://doi.org/10.32870/lv.v7i63.8086.

Women scientists experience socialization shaped by powerful gender and work mandates that influence their identities’ configuration. These mandates are often contradictory. Despite this, academic women continually strive to integrate these mandates into their subjective experiences, not without incurring costs, tensions, or challenges. This document explores, from our experiences as Mexican women scientists, the subjective costs and relational impacts (to our family, friends, partners, and motherhood) of pursuing scientific work as syncretic women, especially in an environment that promotes a culture of self-demand and constant scientific productivity to be evaluated.

We chose a feminist collective autoethnography as our methodology, which was developed in stages: in the first stage, we established prompting questions for individual reflection and then wrote analytical reflections independently. The second stage involved reading each other’s individual reflections. In the third stage, we gathered via Zoom to collectively analyze ideas, observations, and interpretations. Among the findings, we identified subjective costs such as guilt, exhaustion, negative emotions, and a persistent sense of being indebted in some areas of life. Additionally, a central theme in our narratives is the perception of extended costs imposed by our personal scientific pursuits on our partners, fathers, mothers, children, and friends, which compounds the emotional burdens generated by our own sacrifices.

Keywords : women; women scientists; autoethnography; intersubjectivity; costs.

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